Here’re two recent books about tips and rules for design starter to make good to better design. Keep these ideas in mind when designing your next presentation or website, poster, and you’ll get excellent design achievement soon.

Timothy Samara is a graphic designer and educator based in New York City, where he divides his time between consulting, writing, and teaching at the School of Visual Arts, Parsons School of Design, NYU, and Purchase College. He is the author of several books for Rockport Publishers, including Making and Breaking the Grid, Typography Workbook, Publication Design Workbook, Type Style Finder and Design Elements.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Ready to Christmas yet? So I guess you’ll send lots of Christmas cards as usual this year. But for our eco-friendly future we know, online Christmas card is so popular on recent years. Here PresentationHelper.co.uk introduces a simple Online Christmas Card Maker for everyone in Christmas.

With this card creator you can write your own personal message to a friend or loved one on your chosen card, without the need for any design software. You can then send the Christmas cards as an email, a web link or just print it off and send it.

Besides, there’s an old version Christmas Card Generator from PresentationHelper.co.uk, which is also awesome for the holidays.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

1. Export as a Series of Pictures to iPhoto on Mac
As Microsoft announced Microsoft PowerPoint 2008 for Mac last year, getting presentations from Mac to iPhone is relatively easy. PowerPoint exports your presentation as a series of pictures directly to iPhoto, or saves those same slide images as pictures to your Pictures folder. From there, sync pictures to your iPhone through iTunes as usual, then use the built-in Photos or slide show program on your iPhone to show your presentation.

It’s really easy to go and try this way. However, the presentation on iPhone becomes kinda picture slideshow, not with all animations along.

2. Convert as Supported MPEG-4 Video Formats
Since iPhone support MPEG-4 video in .mp4, .m4v, .mov formats, some software vendor offers the idea of presentation to video conversion. You can just convert your PowerPoint presentations to MPEG-4 video first, then import or sync the video to iPhone with iTunes.

This method sounds reasonable, and all animations are here. But please see, video presentation is not slideshow anymore, because you can’t control them easily slide by slide. Right?

3. Remote Control PowerPoint from Computers
So some iPhone application developers find this way to connect PowerPoint with computer via Wi-Fi network. Then you can remote control your PowerPoint presentations wirelessly from your iPhone, with a realtime view of your slides. Show your slides on your PC and use your iPhone or iPod Touch as a clicker.

I haven’t tried this app yet, but the idea seems not bad. If everything goes fine in presentation, that’s the best way so far, if you have a reliable Wi-Fi connection on your iPhone.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Five Tips for Creating a Stand-Out Sales Presentation

Looking to create that perfect eye-catching sales presentation to lock in some last-minute Q4 sales? The you had better rethink your strategy and take your presentation to the virtual scale.

1. Show, rather than tell.
2. Ditch your static slide presentations.
3. Go virtual.
4. Survey says?
5. Know when to stop.

Read full article at:
http://www.presentations.com/msg/content_display/presentations/e3i54e0d1d9416e8c7fbf73d212d777bd11

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

SlideShare Ribbon

As the good connection with desktop and Web apps, this SlideShare release is catching and pushing the industry leading of Web presentation. Microsoft finally joined the market days ago, but it seems not easy to be the king here.

To install the SlideShare Ribbon, you’ll need to PowerPoint 2007, Windows XP Service Pack 2 or later, and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

VideoJug’s “How to Write A PowerPoint Presentation In 5 Minutes” is a great tutorial for most staffs. However, there’s kinda funny elements in it. And I think an real enough briefing-like PowerPoint presentation could be made perfectly in 10 minutes. Besides these tips in that video, I have something else to recommend:

1. To make excellent presentation with professional-looking slides, you need some good PowerPoint template resources on your pocket. See one of my previous post about this here.

2. Getting used to these intuitive features in PowerPoint 2007 will make your creation better and faster. Just learn something like SmartArt, shortcuts, etc. Quick Tips for PowerPoint 2007 on my previous post | PowerPoint 2007 – Get up to speed from Microsoft

3. Attach more. When you’re too busy to summary something in the slides, why not just attach and show the original files within your presentation? Check out some previous posts from me about “attaching documents or objects“, “recording narrations“, “Adding YouTube video clips“, or “embedding real-time Web pages“.

Assuming you’ve got the 10-minute-presentation talent, you got enough breathing space in office, aren’t you?

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

“An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise … No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).”

I guess everyone is thinking, it’s not a jeopardous thing to allow Flash on iPhone platform, and Apple might be too arrogant. However, we have to wait Apple’s agreement – it would be in 9 months I think. Besides, we don’t refuse any tricks, such as the belgian interactive designer Thomas Joos made his tricks to port Flash Lite to the iPhone (http://vilebody.wordpress.com/2008/07/02/porting-flash-lite-to-the-iphone-btween/),

Other Riches: Can Microsoft Silverlight Catch It At First?

Jobs says Flash just doesn’t cut the mustard and won’t show up on the iPhone. Does that mean we can expect Silverlight running on the iPhone first? The 2.0 version of Silverlight features enhanced video support, and initial mobile support for Nokia S60 or Windows Mobile (http://silverlight.net/learn/mobile.aspx). According to Scott Guthrie, VP of Microsoft’s .Net developer division, the company has been working on Silverlight for the iPhone. But, like with Flash, Apple is reluctant to allow third-party Web plug-ins on its handset. If I’m Microsoft, I’ll try my best to persuade Apple, to capture the leading role in the mobile rich market.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Google Docs Make Office More Productive

I usually open those attached Word or Excel documents in my Gmail with Google Docs. That’s the best convenient and safe method I think to review these documents at the first impression. And then recently, more and more co-workers of mine like to share some documents via Google Docs to complete them with collaboration. It’s really save time and energy to do so. And the best part is, we can resume the work anytime anywhere if we get Internet to access Google Docs.

Google Docs Makes Classroom More Interesting

As not a teacher, I’m not sure more uses of Google Docs in classroom, but some teachers ever told me the Google Docs way to enrich the class is so friendly and it can be accepted by more students easily than the ways with LMS (Learning Management System). Certainly Google Docs cannot replace LMS, but for most documents, presentations sharing, it’s easy to get a class closer. There’s an good example presentation by Tom Barrett:

Eleven Interesting Ways to use Google Docs in the Classroom
http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=dhn2vcv5_8323t58h3ft

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Although Microsoft Office is still the dominant in the area of business applications for office, it can’t ignore what’s going in the current markets. It has been quite a few months after I introduced Microsoft’s project “Office Live Workspace Beta” (refer to Live Workshop Rivalry: Build Your Presentation Mind On the Road), and I cited that we really need better Web capabilities on the coming office suite (refer to On The Road: Microsoft Office Has To Bet Its Future On The Web). But why Microsoft decide not catch up the way until 2010?

Microsoft Wants to Make the Best Web Office

I have to thank for all the efforts on those gorgeous ribbons and SmartArts in Office 2007, which really help me a lot on presentations. However, online compatibility is the biggest weakness in the Internet times. The coming Office 14 would be really late for the online office market, but I guess Microsoft won’t make that launch another miss. Heard from Workspace Team Blog, the Sliverlight technology has been added into the new Office Live Workspace. Based on the great rich media technologies from Microsoft Silverlight, maybe the expected Office 14 could move all rich features in Office 2007 to the Web. Isn’t that the best idea to conquer the online land for Microsoft? We’re waiting.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

I can’t tell this new Web friendly Office will catch the future or not. We see, it’s really cool, with the immigration to online office trends like Google Docs. Definitely Microsoft wants to capture the newly Web market as Google does, and it’s not a bad idea to start up testing the future software as service. Does this work? We’ll see how Google makes and wait for the answer.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran